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Candied Sweet Potatoes
5 medium sized yams
¼ cup water
½ cup light brown sugar
3 tablespoons butter
Wash potatoes; cook until soft but not mushy; drain and peel. Cut in slices, lengthwise, and put in a buttered baking pan. Spread with sugar, dot with butter, add a few drops of lemon juice, add the water and brown in oven, basting with the syrup. Serve very hot.
Parsnips may be cooked in the same way.
A straightforward two-stage recipe: boil the potatoes, then glaze them. The original assumes you know your own oven, so the numbers below fill in the gaps.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe only says "brown in oven" and names no heat. A fairly hot oven, somewhere around 400F, will reduce the butter and sugar to a syrup and colour the edges; go by the look of the glaze rather than a fixed number.
- TimingFigure 25-35 minutes, basting two or three times. The glaze is done when it coats the back of a spoon and the slice edges are catching color.
- Don't overboil"Soft but not mushy" is the hinge. Boil the potatoes whole and unpeeled until a knife meets slight resistance at the center, roughly 20-25 minutes for medium ones, then cool a little before peeling and slicing. Fully cooked potatoes collapse into mash under the basting spoon.
- Yams vs. sweet potatoesIn American cookbooks of this period "yam" commonly means an orange-fleshed sweet potato, not the true tropical yam. Use garnet or jewel sweet potatoes; five medium is roughly 1½ to 2 lb.
- Lemon juice"A few drops" is no more than about ⅛ teaspoon. It is not decorative -- the acid keeps the brown sugar syrup from tasting flatly sweet and helps slow crystallization.
- Slice thicknessLengthwise slices about ½ inch thick hold their shape and give the most surface for glazing. Arrange them in a single overlapping layer; stacked, the top browns and the bottom steams.
- YieldServes 5 or 6 as a side dish. Parsnips, as the recipe notes, take the same treatment; they cook faster, so check them earlier.
Candied sweet potatoes belong to a distinctly American line of cookery in which a starchy vegetable is treated almost as a dessert, and the familiar form -- boil, slice, sugar, butter, bake -- was well established in American cookbooks. The brown-sugar-and-butter glaze is a plainer, older approach than the marshmallow-topped casserole that came to dominate later holiday tables; here the sweetening is restrained enough that the dish still reads as a vegetable. The offhand closing note that parsnips may be cooked the same way is a reminder that the technique, not the ingredient, was the point -- any sweet root would take a syrup.